Crimson Death by Laurell K. Hamilton (UK edition)

Title: Crimson Death (An Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, Novel, #25)
Author: Laurell K. Hamilton
Genre: Erotica, Paranormal Romance, Urban Fantasy
Publisher: Headlines (11th October 2016)
Blurb:

MY NAME IS ANITA BLAKE.
I’M A VAMPIRE HUNTER AND NECROMANCER, AND I’M ABOUT TO LEARN THAT EVIL IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER . . .

I’ve never seen Damian, my vampire servant, in such a state. The rising sun doesn’t usher in the peaceful death that he desperately needs. Instead, he’s being bombarded with violent nightmares and blood sweats.

Damian is at his most vulnerable, but now is the time I need him most. The vampire who created him, who subjected him to centuries of torture, might be loosing control, allowing rogue vampires to run wild and break one of their kind’s few strict taboos.

Some say love is a great motivator, but hatred gets the job done, too. I’m joining forces with my friend Edward to stop the carnage, and Damian will be at our side, even if it means travelling back to the land where all his nightmares spring from . . . a place that couldn’t be less welcoming to a vampire, an assassin and  a necromancer.

Ireland.

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️(4 stars)
Review:

CRIMSON DEATH by Laurell K. Hamilton is the twenty-fifth novel in her excellent Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series. This book sees Anita travel to Ireland at the request of her friend Edward, to deal with vampires running rogue – they may even been breaking one of the strictest taboos within their culture. However, traveling to Ireland means going to the one place Damian does not want to return to – the home of the vampire that made him – but Anita desperately needs his help. It doesn’t help that Damian is being bombarded with violent nightmares and blood sweats, as the rising dawn no longer appears to grant him peaceful death.

CRIMSON DEATH was one of my most anticipated books of this year, and Hamilton did not disappoint. Yes this book still suffers from the same problems as previous books in the series, but I still found it to be a page-turner and overall a really enjoyable and engrossing read. If you have kept with the series so far and still enjoy it, then this is another solid addition to it. I do have a few minor quibbles in terms of characterisation and the plot structure, but I just picked this up and found it difficult to stop until I reached the end – and what higher praise is there than that?

So as I said there are a few things in terms of the plot that I had minor gripes with, the first of which was the fact that it took almost 400 pages (that’s more than half the book) for the main plot (at least, according to the blurb) to kick in. I did enjoy that first part of the book, don’t get me wrong, and I do think it added to the character development, but it just seemed an awful long time. Plot wise CRIMSON DEATH is pretty much what you would expect from any book in the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series. One of my favourite things about this book was that it allows us to see a bit more of the world, outside of the US, and see how they’re handling the presence of vampires et al.

CRIMSON DEATH saw the return of a lot of familiar faces, some I was more pleased to see than others (I’m not going to say who, as it’s very much a personal preference). Hamilton did some good character development in this book, and it was interesting to watch things change and evolve – though linked with my previous sentence, not always in ways that I liked. It was however nice to see a much more relaxed Anita in this book. She finally seems to have become comfortable with herself. Wedding planning was also a theme in this book, and I’m wondering if we’re actually going to see them play out on the page in a future book.

This review was a hard one to write. Hopefully I succeeded in my goal to balance the positive and negative things I found about this book. For all the things I didn’t enjoy about this book, I do still think that it’s a good solid four-star book. In terms of reading experience I kind of want to give it five stars, but as you can see from my review there were a few things that tipped the balance. If you have enjoyed the series so far then I do recommend that you pick this book up.